Friday, October 31, 2014

At Patently-O in The Number of U.S. Patents In Force, Dennis Crouch has a graphic titled "Timeseries Showing the Number of US Utility Patents in Force, Grouped by Patent Age" which shows a clear, unabated and massive rise in the number of utility patents in force, starting in the year 1999, when the current "99ers patent gold rush" began and quickly established itself as the "patent world meme".

Equally responsible, however, for the burgeoning patent glut is a "do nothing" U.S. Supreme Court which denied certiorari in the State Street case, making the Federal Circuit Court decision final, and essentially establishing State Street Bank as the patent law in force, and letting virtually everything be patentable.

Recent foolishly permissive and wishy-washy Supreme Court patent decisions, which allegedly "limit" State Street significantly, such as In re Bilski, have done nothing to stem the glut of patents as the entire business world continues to take up the State Street patent meme, a happening which reminds of the frenzied 49ers of California Gold Rush days, when hundreds of thousands of gold-seekers arrived in California to seek quick fortunes, just as is being done in the patent wars of today -- where USPTO-issued patents for obvious, non-innovative state-of-art developments in all fields of modern technology continue to offer the carrot of instant millions or even billions of dollars in windfall income for clever patent applicants and holders.

If we had enough judges with any practical sense on the Federal Circuit or the Supreme Court, and if Congress were not filled with people trying to play President rather than legislating sensibly, this would not be happening.

Until then, many fortunes will be made by clever people, whose main claim to fame is that they know how to "ride the system".

Thursday, October 30, 2014

This year LawPundit hit an accumulated half-a-million online hits since its inception in 2003. We are thus converting past postings into print form -- and, with some selected exceptions, are removing past online postings, making room for the new things to come.

Originally, each volume was priced identically and affordably in terms of $US dollars, but conversions to other currencies may differ because of different publishing dates and other e.g. website variables not under our control. We make no guarantees about pricing, which, of course, is always subject to change -- this is one great advantage of on-demand publishing. Caveat emptor.

LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB is also available for Kindle and for iPhone and iTab, whereby we have converted each book page as a graphic for use by the appropriate format -- pages should be resizable as a whole on your device.

Online here at LawPundit, for purposes of presentation, we make separate postings for each volume of LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB. All cover photos were made personally by Andis Kaulins, the LawPundit, on location, except for teaching at Trier Law School (made by a student), and the photograph at the Düsseldorf Opera (made by a guest), from which the profile photos are made.

We describe this series at Amazon.com and Amazon sister sites as follows:

"The here published materials focus on law, legal issues and jurisprudence, including intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks), Constitutional Law, information technology (IT), telecommunications, new media, the Internet, social media networking, politics and current events, personal computers and their spin-offs (smartphones, pads, tablets), sports, travel, the history of civilization, the history of law, cyberspace, and lifestyle.

Law is a Seamless Web is a multi-volume publication that contains a wide selection of the "collected wisdom" of LawPundit postings, starting in the year 2003. LawPundit content has been edited substantially for purposes of print and ebook publication. Photographs by the author originally posted to the blog were removed to avoid printing problems and ebook conversion. For legal intellectual property reasons, postings that originally contained too much text material from copyrighted sources were truncated or not included at all. Short quotes from such third parties are included, however, as permissible "fair use". Longer text quotations are used sparingly and involve "public" texts, e.g. court opinions, government documents or sources freely available with attribution (e.g. Wikipedia). Ultimately selected materials concentrate on topics that presumably remain of general or specialized interest over longer periods of time, also beyond the original dates of posting.

The initial selections for the print version were checked for the currency of links, substituting current pages or removing dead links as required, but this turned out to be such a gargantuan task that we ultimately abandoned it, since such changes also changed the general content of postings. Many links simply have no permanence. That is part of the ephemeral nature of the digital landscape, even in law.

LawPundit is a legal blog, a so-called "blawg", originally hosted at lawpundit.com, that was started in the year 2003 by Andis Kaulins, J.D. Stanford University Law School 1971.

This year LawPundit hit an accumulated half-a-million online hits since its inception in 2003. We are thus converting past postings into print form -- and, with some selected exceptions, are removing past online postings, making room for the new things to come.

LawPundit 2003-2014 (selected postings) in print is now available for your libraries and professional or personal use at CreateSpace.com, individually by volume as a four-volume printed series titled LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB (each volume is 326 pages, except for the first, which is 328 pages). Go to https://www.createspace.com/5024945.

Originally, each volume was priced identically and affordably in terms of $US dollars, but conversions to other currencies may differ because of different publishing dates and other e.g. website variables not under our control. We make no guarantees about pricing, which, of course, is always subject to change -- this is one great advantage of on-demand publishing. Caveat emptor.

LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB is also available for Kindle and for iPhone and iTab, whereby we have converted each book page as a graphic for use by the appropriate format -- pages should be resizable as a whole on your device.

Online here at LawPundit, for purposes of presentation, we make separate postings for each volume of LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB. All cover photos were made personally by Andis Kaulins, the LawPundit, on location, except for teaching at Trier Law School (made by a student), and the photograph at the Düsseldorf Opera (made by a guest), from which the profile photos are made.

We describe this series at Amazon.com and Amazon sister sites as follows:

"The here published materials focus on law, legal issues and jurisprudence, including intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks), Constitutional Law, information technology (IT), telecommunications, new media, the Internet, social media networking, politics and current events, personal computers and their spin-offs (smartphones, pads, tablets), sports, travel, the history of civilization, the history of law, cyberspace, and lifestyle.

Law is a Seamless Web is a multi-volume publication that contains a wide selection of the "collected wisdom" of LawPundit postings, starting in the year 2003. LawPundit content has been edited substantially for purposes of print and ebook publication. Photographs by the author originally posted to the blog were removed to avoid printing problems and ebook conversion. For legal intellectual property reasons, postings that originally contained too much text material from copyrighted sources were truncated or not included at all. Short quotes from such third parties are included, however, as permissible "fair use". Longer text quotations are used sparingly and involve "public" texts, e.g. court opinions, government documents or sources freely available with attribution (e.g. Wikipedia). Ultimately selected materials concentrate on topics that presumably remain of general or specialized interest over longer periods of time, also beyond the original dates of posting.

The initial selections for the print version were checked for the currency of links, substituting current pages or removing dead links as required, but this turned out to be such a gargantuan task that we ultimately abandoned it, since such changes also changed the general content of postings. Many links simply have no permanence. That is part of the ephemeral nature of the digital landscape, even in law.

LawPundit is a legal blog, a so-called "blawg", originally hosted at lawpundit.com, that was started in the year 2003 by Andis Kaulins, J.D. Stanford University Law School 1971.

This year LawPundit hit an accumulated half-a-million online hits since its inception in 2003. We are thus converting past postings into print form -- and, with some selected exceptions, are removing past online postings, making room for the new things to come.

LawPundit 2003-2014 (selected postings) in print is now available for your libraries and professional or personal use at CreateSpace.com, individually by volume as a four-volume printed series titled LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB (each volume is 326 pages, except for the first, which is 328 pages). Go to https://www.createspace.com/4995841.

Originally, each volume was priced identically and affordably in terms of $US dollars, but conversions to other currencies may differ because of different publishing dates and other e.g. website variables not under our control. We make no guarantees about pricing, which, of course, is always subject to change -- this is one great advantage of on-demand publishing. Caveat emptor.

LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB is also available for Kindle and for iPhone and iTab, whereby we have converted each book page as a graphic for use by the appropriate format -- pages should be resizable as a whole on your device.

Online here at LawPundit, for purposes of presentation, we make separate postings for each volume of LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB. All cover photos were made personally by Andis Kaulins, the LawPundit, on location, except for teaching at Trier Law School (made by a student), and the photograph at the Düsseldorf Opera (made by a guest), from which the profile photos are made.

We describe this series at Amazon.com and Amazon sister sites as follows:

"The here published materials focus on law, legal issues and jurisprudence, including intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks), Constitutional Law, information technology (IT), telecommunications, new media, the Internet, social media networking, politics and current events, personal computers and their spin-offs (smartphones, pads, tablets), sports, travel, the history of civilization, the history of law, cyberspace, and lifestyle.

Law is a Seamless Web is a multi-volume publication that contains a wide selection of the "collected wisdom" of LawPundit postings, starting in the year 2003. LawPundit content has been edited substantially for purposes of print and ebook publication. Photographs by the author originally posted to the blog were removed to avoid printing problems and ebook conversion. For legal intellectual property reasons, postings that originally contained too much text material from copyrighted sources were truncated or not included at all. Short quotes from such third parties are included, however, as permissible "fair use". Longer text quotations are used sparingly and involve "public" texts, e.g. court opinions, government documents or sources freely available with attribution (e.g. Wikipedia). Ultimately selected materials concentrate on topics that presumably remain of general or specialized interest over longer periods of time, also beyond the original dates of posting.

The initial selections for the print version were checked for the currency of links, substituting current pages or removing dead links as required, but this turned out to be such a gargantuan task that we ultimately abandoned it, since such changes also changed the general content of postings. Many links simply have no permanence. That is part of the ephemeral nature of the digital landscape, even in law.

LawPundit is a legal blog, a so-called "blawg", originally hosted at lawpundit.com, that was started in the year 2003 by Andis Kaulins, J.D. Stanford University Law School 1971.

This year LawPundit hit an accumulated half-a-million online hits since its inception in 2003. We are thus converting past postings into print form -- and, with some selected exceptions, are removing past online postings, making room for the new things to come.

LawPundit 2003-2014 (selected postings) in print is now available for your libraries and professional or personal use at CreateSpace.com, individually by volume as a four-volume printed series titled LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB (each volume is 326 pages, except for the first, which is 328 pages). Go to https://www.createspace.com/4974386.

Originally, each volume was priced identically and affordably in terms of $US dollars, but conversions to other currencies may differ because of different publishing dates and other e.g. website variables not under our control. We make no guarantees about pricing, which, of course, is always subject to change -- this is one great advantage of on-demand publishing. Caveat emptor.

LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB is also available for Kindle and for iPhone and iTab, whereby we have converted each book page as a graphic for use by the appropriate format -- pages should be resizable as a whole on your device.

Online here at LawPundit, for purposes of presentation, we make separate postings for each volume of LAW IS A SEAMLESS WEB. All cover photos were made personally by Andis Kaulins, the LawPundit, on location, except for teaching at Trier Law School (made by a student), and the photograph at the Düsseldorf Opera (made by a guest), from which the profile photos are made.

We describe this series at Amazon.com and Amazon sister sites as follows:

"The here published materials focus on law, legal issues and jurisprudence, including intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks), Constitutional Law, information technology (IT), telecommunications, new media, the Internet, social media networking, politics and current events, personal computers and their spin-offs (smartphones, pads, tablets), sports, travel, the history of civilization, the history of law, cyberspace, and lifestyle.

Law is a Seamless Web is a multi-volume publication that contains a wide selection of the "collected wisdom" of LawPundit postings, starting in the year 2003. LawPundit content has been edited substantially for purposes of print and ebook publication. Photographs by the author originally posted to the blog were removed to avoid printing problems and ebook conversion. For legal intellectual property reasons, postings that originally contained too much text material from copyrighted sources were truncated or not included at all. Short quotes from such third parties are included, however, as permissible "fair use". Longer text quotations are used sparingly and involve "public" texts, e.g. court opinions, government documents or sources freely available with attribution (e.g. Wikipedia). Ultimately selected materials concentrate on topics that presumably remain of general or specialized interest over longer periods of time, also beyond the original dates of posting.

The initial selections for the print version were checked for the currency of links, substituting current pages or removing dead links as required, but this turned out to be such a gargantuan task that we ultimately abandoned it, since such changes also changed the general content of postings. Many links simply have no permanence. That is part of the ephemeral nature of the digital landscape, even in law.

LawPundit is a legal blog, a so-called "blawg", originally hosted at lawpundit.com, that was started in the year 2003 by Andis Kaulins, J.D. Stanford University Law School 1971.

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Responsible for Blog Content: Verantwortlich für den Inhalt:(required by German Law):Andis KaulinsGartenstrasse 1056841 Traben-TrarbachGermanyContact: first and last name dot-separated at gmail dot com